Why is ASCII code important when you press a key on your keyboard

Explanation:

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All computer data is just numbers. Each character of text is stored as a number. When you press a key on the keyboard, the keyboard sends a number, corresponding to the key that was pressed. When text is displayed on your monitor, each character is read from memory as a number and “drawn” as a glyph on the display. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a mapping from each character used in American English to a corresponding number. You can find the ASCII table easily: ASCII character codes and html, octal, hex and decimal chart conversion. Before ASCII each computer manufacturer used their own mapping of glyphs to numbers, and data from one computer could not be easily moved to another. It had to be translated. ASCII offered the advantage of compatibility and allowed printers, terminals, etc from one manufacturer to be used with devices from another manufacturer.

ASCII was extended, by the ISO 8851 standards, to support glyphs from languages other than US English, and served for quite some time. Eventually a project was started to build a single mapping from glyphs to numbers that would cover every language ever used for all of history, and leave some room for new languages. That project resulted in the Unicode standard. Each character in the ASCII table is encoded as a number between 0 and 127, requiring 7 bits to be stored for each character. A straightforward fixed-length encoding of Unicode would require about four times as many bits as ASCII. However, several variable-length encodings have been developed. One of them, UTF-8, is compatible with ASCII. So any ASCII text is also UTF-8 text, but UTF-8 text can contain characters that are not in the ASCII table